Many of us have issues with our parents. Most of us, if lucky, feel a bit of discomfort at some generation gap differences.
Not quite so with Mira Bartok.
The author and illustrator has had to overcome a lot over the years, and she writes about it beautifully and thoughtfully in her book, The Memory Palace (2011, Free Press, Simon & Schuster, Inc.).
Throughout her life, one of Bartok’s biggest challenges has been in dealing with her troubled mother. The woman was a brilliant pianist but suffered a breakdown around the age of 19, hearing voices, suffering paranoia and erratic mood swings.
Fortunately Bartok didn’t quite have to go it alone. She has a sister, a year older, so the girls could confide in one another, and for many years their grandparents were available for support. (Though, it should be said, her grandfather showed some signs of instability as well.)
Bartok’s story has an added layer of melancholy, though. As an adult she was in a car accident that caused her brain trauma. Initially doctors thought nothing was wrong since she didn’t lose consciousness for long and showed no signs of anything being amiss. At least not the night of the accident. The next day she was out of sorts, confused, suffering memory problems. It turns out the accident had caused some brain damage, in particular making her susceptible to sensory overload and affecting her memory.
The book begins when Mira and her sister come to Ohio as their mother is dying of cancer. They hadn’t seen her in years, having changed their names and keeping their locations a secret. (They did, in particular Mira, continue to communicate with their mother via P.O. boxes.)
But now their mother is devastatingly ill and has weeks left to live. The girls (now adults in their 40s) return to Ohio to see to their mother’s last days. As they visit, set her up in a nursing home, and help put affairs in order, they discover their mother has a storage locker filled with letters and more from the past. They find books they loved as children, toys, pictures and more. In one way it’s too much to process for Mira, but in another way it helps rebuild parts of her past, a “memory palace” of the mind, if you will.
The reader is led through Mira’s story, through the fear and humiliations the girls suffered. Of course, it wasn’t their mother’s fault, not exactly. And Mira is not one to blame, except to maybe mention the cuts in social services during the Reagan administration. As a child and adult, Bartok agonized about her mother, wishing she could somehow fix her or save her. Eventually, after several bad spells — one where her mother nearly sliced her neck with a broken bottle, and another where her caused a ruckus at her job and got her fired — she comes to realize she needs to distance herself from her mother in order to save herself. After all, her mother believes that her memories are being stolen, that gas is being pumped into her room at night, that her daughters’ wombs may have been sliced out of their bodies while they were sleeping. And their mother constantly wants the family — mother and two daughters — to move back in together into the same apartment building they lived in decades back.
Bartok makes the hard choice to live a separate life, coping with abandonment and fear for her mother’s safety, but ultimately she in many ways comes to peace with her mother’s legacy at the end the troubled woman’s life, through things she discovers about the life outside her mother’s homelessness and delusions.
It’s a story of hope, of compassion, of understanding, that is easily as uplifting as it is sad.